G. Wesley Johnson

Wes Johnson’s first academic appointment was at Stanford University, where he began what turned out to be a lifelong study of Francophone Africa, on which he published several monographs over the years. It was also at Stanford that he began to pursue the academic study of the Mormon religion, joining several other young historians to establish Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, a journal that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. Later, in his final academic home at Brigham Young, he was one of the leaders in establishing the Mormon Outmigration Leadership History Project.

Editorial Preface

Articles/Essays – Volume 01, No. 1

Mormons have long remained isolated from their neighbors by choice and by necessity. Today is not the past, however, and most Mormons live outside of Utah. Los Angeles and New York are as important subsidiary…

The Founding and the Fortieth: Reflections on the Challenge of Editing and the Promise of Dialogue

Articles/Essays – Volume 39, No. 3

We are now celebrating forty years of continuous publication of this journal, quite a feat for an enterprise that was launched on a wing and a prayer. My purpose in this essay is to give a short background on my early interest in becoming an editor, how I wound up at Stanford, met Gene England and my other founding colleagues, how we developed a new publication over a six-year period (including our many trials and tribulations), the reaction to this enterprise, and how we transferred the journal to UCLA and created a mechanism that has provided an orderly transition for forty years. Also included is a concluding analysis of why I think Dialogue has more than lived up to the promise its founders hoped for.